Today, we continue our series highlighting some of our favorite uses of Twitter. (Last week, we shared some tips on using the Advanced Search tool.)

Do you ever wish you had a personal assistant that could research and answer the multitude of questions you face each day? Now you can – without spending a penny. If you’ll invest a small of amount of time and thoughtfulness building your Twitter profile and network, it can do this for you.

Curious? Here are some examples:

Last Saturday, local attorney Ralph Perez posted a tweet asking for suggestions on colleges to take his daughter to visit this summer.

In just a few minutes, he had several replies.

The same day, Michael Hyatt, CEO of Thomas Nelson Publishers, posted this question:

And here’s a sampling of the replies he received:

And you can even take your research one step further and learn from other people’s questions. Let’s say you see another user post a question asking for book recommendations. By searching for @ replies, you can see how other users replied to the question.

We’ll try a live example.

Above is a message I posted this morning as I was writing this post. You can go to search.twitter.com and enter @kkinnison to see all of the replies from my post. (Don’t forget the @ symbol. It’s how you designate a reply on Twitter.)

Have you ever used Twitter to crowd-source an answer to a question? Comment below and tell us about it.